


Ophelia’s Début

by alcyone (Alcyone301)



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Advent Calendar 2014, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 04:50:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2800193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alcyone301/pseuds/alcyone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aboard <i>Surprise</i> in the Indian Ocean, the evening of a Christmas Day. Jack reminisces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ophelia’s Début

**Author's Note:**

> Beta: the peerless alltoseek

The last notes of the allegro faded into the relative quiet; there was still some faint singing coming from the forecastle. Jack put his fiddle down on the stern lockers and lit the hanging lanterns – the spark of his steel surprisingly bright in the dimming light, the sun just below the horizon ahead; beyond the stern windows, the wake stretched straight to the darkening sky, Procyon rising abaft the larboard beam.

Returning to the lockers, he half-filled their glasses with the last of the Priorato and raised his voice, calling for Killick. They were discussing some minor tweaks to their transcription of the Veracini sonata when the steward walked in, asking ‘What now’ in his usual harsh tones; a few beats later, in a lower tone, adding ‘sir.’

‘Bring along a couple of bottles of the doctor’s red seal, will you?’

‘That will be a sad descent from this excellent Priorat, Jack. It’s a simple garnatxa.’

‘Would you prefer more of the madeira he bought in Cape Town?’

‘No, carry on,’ said Stephen, grimacing.

Jack played the opening statement of the genial Leclair allegro, and they played it through with the savour and fluency acquired through years of enjoying it together.

Killick had brought the wine as requested, as well as two covered bowls. Jack peered into these, then carefully decanted the wine.

Stephen was paging through the music when Jack brought him his glass and sat down on the lockers again. Drinking, he remarked, ‘You would almost say raspberries’.

‘It is young, yet. It improves with age, sure.’ He drank. ‘I first tasted this wine not a month before that first Christmas in Catalunya we were talking about. But you were telling me about Christmas eve at your neighbours’ house, joy. Pray continue.’

‘Yes, well. I had thought to spend the whole day at Damplow, but my great-aunt Lettice wanted me to stay at Woolcombe and help her welcome the last of our guests. She had supposed her duties as hostess would be nominal, but my father had disappeared into the stables or the kennels or somewhere, as usual. The guests straggled in, just another parcel of soldiers, and none of them with children or any conversation beyond, ‘D’ye hear what happened to old Colonel Duffer’ and the latest outrageous act in Parliament. But I did my duty and she was good enough to let me escape by midday.’

He paused, absently rolling the glass in his hand and watching the wine’s motion. Stephen rarely had much difficulty reading Jack’s passing reflections on his open and expressive countenance, and he was not surprised when with a wry smile Jack said, ‘I suppose I am coming to be like that myself. To me, as a child, it seemed intolerably boring, excepting perhaps when they talked of an action or a campaign or even their mounts. Does a gathering of sea officers bore you, old Stephen?’

He smiled. ‘Sometimes. But I am become an old sea-dog myself, by now, and when the conversation becomes a little bit what I may call _hypernautical_ , I can still amuse myself in contemplating the varieties and strange tongues of _Homo navalis_ –‘

Above them, three bells struck.

‘Your tale, Jack?’

‘Queeney came out that year – it had been delayed because of her papa’s death the previous year - and she and her mama were in London, clearing for action, so to speak; they had left most of Streatham Park closed up, and were not planning on staying the whole season - I remember being heartily pleased and relieved when she returned before I left home that spring. But however there was still quite a gathering in Dorset, and I had been particularly bidden to come join them as usual. Her aunt and uncle Salusbury were acting as hosts, and Dr Johnson and quite a lot of their regular circle of laterali were still there.’

‘Laterali, my dear?’

‘Learned friends, I mean, poets and authors and so forth.’ He emptied his glass.

‘It’s odd that I remember Queeney’s house as quieter than Woolcombe. There were more guests there, and they talked, but it was interesting, and there were women and children, too, not just those braying soldiers.

‘Overnight Susannah had convinced her aunt to let us take part in the charades that were to form the first of the evening’s entertainment. You know how we play charades, Stephen?’

‘Not I.’

‘But you’ve heard of them?’

‘Only that it was all the rage in Paris a generation ago – some kind of party entertainment, I believe. Acting out poems, is it?’

‘Something like that. You get up a team and plan a little dramatic offering – two or three or more little sketches, as elaborate as you like, illustrating some word or phrase or part of a song, without actually saying it, of course, and then the guests try to guess what it is meant to be.’

Reminiscing, he smiled, softly plucking a graceful melody on the violin.

‘I haven’t thought about it for years. It was such fun, you would’ve enjoyed it. Just the thing for a learned cove.

‘Normally the younger children would not be included, but Susannah begged and pleaded, and her aunt Salusbury agreed to let us have a go, early in the evening, on the understanding that we would have to include Sophia, if she was willing to leave off nursing Hester, which she never did, and Cecilia, who was practically a baby. Susannah was my age, eleven, but Cissy was not more than five or six years old. But however we found a use for her.

‘We made up our own plot and costumes. We had plenty of time while the guests were dining – we ate in the small dining room, earlier than the adults, you see, and lucky I was to be included. Such a feast,’ he added happily. ‘Cissy and Hester drank milk, but the older children had well-watered wine for the occasion. We started with pease soup with bacon in it, and then fish, cod and sole I believe, remarkably fresh, in oyster sauce. Then we had one of the partridges that had fallen apart in the roasting, with a stuffing of chopped dried fruit and nuts, delicious. A stew of beef in a rich red sauce, with carrots and more dried fruit, part of a mutton shoulder from dinner the day before – how sorry I was to have missed that - any number of side dishes, and a splendid orange bag-pudding to finish.’

Stephen listened with his head slightly cocked to the side, looking affectionately at Jack’s beaming face, during this enthusiastic recital.

Jack, inspired by memory, said, ‘It’s still too early for supper, but let’s see what we have here.’ He rose, and carrying his violin sat down at the table, uncovering the bowls to reveal dried plums in one, sugared lemon peel in the other. Stephen joined him there, leaving the cello on its side by the music-stand, and pulled a pair of cloth bags of nuts from one of the side lockers.

Jack cracked the walnuts in his hands, several at once, and the hazelnuts by the handful; they sat companionably, quietly, eating the nuts and fruit, drinking the wine.

Out the stern window, it was dark, the phosphorescent wake straight as an arrow, pointing east. Procyon was climbing the sky, now thickly spangled, the arc of the Milky Way pouring down from the north.

After a time Stephen remarked, ‘It’s pleasing to drink wine made from grapes grown on your own land, so distant, and this harvest so remote in time; perhaps even more so to eat one’s own hazelnuts. It’s a taste of my childhood; I can almost say which tree each comes from. How complex is the interplay between scent and taste and memory; how powerfully evocative the senses language cannot describe.’

He gazed out into the dark; then, returning to the present, ‘You were enjoying your orange bag-pudding, so?’

‘We had planned our charade in whispers during the meal, Susannah and I. Sophie took Hester back to the nursery directly after our dinner, as we had expected, and the governess had a few choice words about whispering at table before she followed them. Afterwards we had a couple of hours and the run of the nursery, as well as the property-room, to get our costumes in order.

‘The stage area was the broad side of the large drawing room on the first floor – it was actually the ballroom with the back part closed off. One of the side rooms was set up as backstage and property room – full of all manner of odd things, old clothes and almost anything portable and not too valuable from the nursery, the games room, the kitchens, everywhere.’

He paused, reflecting. ‘Listen, Stephen, you have a headpiece. Tell me what you make of it, will you?’

‘In the first scene, I came onto the stage area in Queeney’s riding boots, wearing white breeches and a red jacket with a sword – a real one, luckily I was already rather tall - at my side. The girls were also in red – Cissy’s red was closer to pink - and our hair all powdered, with flour, such a mess, and clubbed. We had tried for pipeclayed crossbelts but all we could find was some white ribbon, which made a poor show. Susannah carried a musket on her shoulder - a broomstick, with a big kitchen funnel tied on, and a black scarf binding the straw tight. Cissy beat time with wooden spoons on a tin canister hung upside-down from a ribbon round her neck, and I had my fiddle. I played a tune as we circled the stage in order and went out. This one,’ he said, playing a lively galliarde. ‘We had some trouble getting the drum away from Cissy and getting her dressed for the next scene, I recall. All the Thrales were rather headstrong, now I think on it. It was good training for a future King’s officer,’ he added, laughing.

‘We retired to the dressing-room and got ourselves up for the second scene. I was dressed as a shepherd: barefoot in breeches and a loose shirt, a soft cap on my head, carrying a wooden traverso flute – a sort of German flute, in fact,’ he admitted, with a self-deprecating smile, and played a fragment of that same graceful melody on the violin. ‘That’s what I was tootling. Susannah was dressed as a shepherdess, barefoot in a short dress with a pinny, and a poke-bonnet, carrying a crook – one of uncle Salusbury’s canes carried aloft as a crook. We had dressed Cissy as a lamb, in a short dress covered with quickly sewn-on tufts of wool, on her head a nightcap also covered in wool, with ears made of drawing paper drooping at the sides. She was to wander onto the stage while I sang my song to the shepherdess.’ Jack blushed. ‘My voice hadn’t broken yet, you know. I still sang in the church choir.’

He played the melody through, humming, then sat quietly, eyes unfocussed, abstracted.

‘Your narrative falters, brother?’

‘Oh, I beg your pardon.’ He put the violin down.

‘She was the sweetest thing, Stephen. I kissed her. She didn’t know I was going to – nor did I, ha ha. I would never have dared had it not been called for – we were forever hearing about those Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses sighing about love all the livelong day, and the song was of that type. It appeared to me to be a necessary move, to convince the guests we were in fact looking after sheep. And I was fond of her, and admired her spirit. She had something wrong with her legs, and hated to expose them, but she did it because it was necessary to the plot, and, well, I wanted to kiss her.’

‘What was amiss with her legs?’ 

‘I don’t know exactly. They were a bit crooked, but she got around all right. I think they pained her because she was sometimes a little bit short-tempered.

‘So we collected the lamb, Susannah brushed her – the governess was put out about that, as it turned out to be her brush, and there was a good deal of wool in the bristles – and I tied a flowery rope around her neck, an old floral brocade bell-pull, furled and bound, and we wandered off to applause.

‘For the third scene, we pulled some of the orange-trees in tubs into a cluster in the middle of the stage. I came onstage, wrapped in a fur pelisse, a braided rope with the end unpicked dragging from the seat of my breeches, my hair all loose and the powder mostly brushed out, topped with an old bouffant wig, yellowed with age. I made a show of hearing something offstage and hid behind the orange-trees.

‘The girls came out, dressed in breeches and full length, skirted coats, and round hats. They had black spatterdashes on to suggest boots. Susannah had drawn a moustache in blacking on herself, but Cissy had refused, wisely as it turned out – it was devilish hard to wash off, I heard - and Susannah carried the musket from our first scene. They peered around, and then I leapt out at them with a fearsome growl. Cissy shrieked – mostly giggled, to tell the truth - and dashed away, and Susannah levelled her musket and shouted ‘bang’. I fell directly to the ground, rolled around a bit and died.

‘We brought the house down, as they say – such applause – and the scolding we got for our various sins, later on, was hardly serious. So it was a success.’

He paused. ‘Do you smoke it, Stephen?’ he said, wistfully.

‘I am sorry to disappoint you, brother. I do not.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ said Jack, shaking his head sadly. ‘It’s rather an English expression, out of a play, Shakespeare, I dare say. How they laughed, though, when we told them, and such congratulations.

‘I was rather disillusioned however that nobody guessed it, and they such a bright crowd, you know, such a learned family, and their friends just the same. It’s common enough an expression, in all conscience.’ He fell silent, emptying his wine glass.

‘Well, what is it, for all love?’

‘Why, _March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a dead lion_ , of course.’

‘Ah,’ said Stephen, nodding, ‘of course.’ He coughed, hastily emptied his wine glass, then coughed again; he returned to his seat by the stern windows, picking up the cello and busying himself tuning it.

Jack watched him, a frown gathering on his brow.

‘Now I think of it, perhaps that wasn’t quite right, neither.’ He shook his head, took up his violin and returned to the lockers.

‘Well, I suppose it contributed to the Christmas cheer at the Thrales’, right or wrong … _In like a lamb, out like a hanged sheep_?’ he murmured, ‘ _In like a lamb, out like a bull in a basin_?’

Stephen looked up, rather pink in the face. ‘This saying, now, it refers to the coming of Spring, I make no doubt? Might it be _March comes in crying wolf and goes out in sheep’s clothing_? Perhaps _lies down with the lamb and rises with the lark_?’

‘Rises with the lark, that’s good. I’m sure it’s a real saying, too, but not the one I want.’

‘How about _March comes in like a dead horse in a china shop_? Or _God tempers the wind to the shorn lion_?’

Jack considered this, absently plucking a run of four notes. He looked up, eyes brightening. ‘And a good thing it is, too, else the lion would have to put on sheep’s clothing, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, lest the March winds turn him into a dead lion. Oh, ha ha ha,’ and he dissolved into wholehearted laughter, delighted with his own wit, delighted with the world. Stephen watched him with undisguised affection.

After a time Jack pulled out his handkerchief, wiping his face and gasping. ‘Oh, oh, my belly hurts. What a pair of clever witty coves we are, to be sure.’

‘Shall we have some music now, joy?’

Jack paused, then smiling happily, began a familiar piece from _Messiah_. Stephen had joined in for a few notes before he stopped, abruptly recalling the text; he closed his eyes and emitted a few disagreeable creaking noises, as Jack looked on, very pleased.

Stephen, shaking his head, said, ‘Jack, my dear, I bow to you,’ and did so. ‘You are the wit of the world, so you are,’ and subsided once more into his unlovely laughter.

‘How happy I am that you enjoy it so. When you are quite ready, we might try the Corelli, and then perhaps have an early supper and let Killick get some sleep.’

**Author's Note:**

> The music that cracks Stephen up is:  
> • Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759): “All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray” from _Messiah_. (4m)
> 
> The rest of the music:
> 
> • Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768): Violin Sonata #6 in A (20 m) [finishing as the fic starts]
> 
> • Jean-Marie Leclair (1697-1764): Violin Concerto in F, Op. 10, no. 4: I. Allegro (7m) [played waiting for the garnatxa]
> 
> • Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654): Galliarde: Battaglia à 5 (4 m) [charade, first scene]
> 
> • Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767): Eurimedes’ aria “Augelletti, che cantate” from _Orpheus_ (3 m) [charade, second scene; also the ‘graceful melody’]  
>     
> • Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713): Concerto Grosso in G minor, Op.6, no.8, “ _Fatto per la notte di Natale_ ” aka "Christmas Concerto" (15 m) [at the end]


End file.
